


Of Green Leaves and Vapour

by bobaheadshark



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Adventurers, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Archaeology, Badass Ladies, Blended Universe - Canon Elements, F/M, Mystery, Princess and Frog prompt, Prometheus influences, Reylo (later), Reylo Valentines Exchange, Rock Climbing, Setting - Vietnam, Slowbuild Chapter 1, caving
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-14
Updated: 2020-02-14
Packaged: 2021-02-28 05:35:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,665
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22720015
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bobaheadshark/pseuds/bobaheadshark
Summary: “Belay.” Rey said, face inches from a shard of limestone.“Got you.” Rose replied, from her perch above. “Hey, check out that stalagmite formation. If you squint, it looks like a T-Rex.”“You and your imagination, Rose. Told you binge-watching Jurassic Park on the iPad was a bad idea.” Jannah said.----Rey, Jannah, and Rose are an all-female expedition team. A new caving adventure in Vietnam puts their scientific convictions to the test, especially when Rey meets a rather unusual bullfrog.AKA a princess and the frog prompt remixed w/ Southeast Asia and magic realism. For @alhenacrimson as part of #reylovalentines2020.
Relationships: Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 7
Kudos: 18
Collections: Reylo Valentine's Exchange 2020





	Of Green Leaves and Vapour

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AlhenaCrimson](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlhenaCrimson/gifts).



> AlhenaCrimson's prompt for the #Reylovalentinesexchange2020: 
> 
> _The princess and the frog AU. Ben Solo makes some bad life choices and he’s turned into a frog. Rey finds him (and she wants to eat frog soup)! We all deserve Froglo and a HEA._
> 
>   
> I've taken it and spun this in a different and maybe spookier direction. But I hope you like it! It will take a little while to get to the Reylo, but I promise we will. Also sorry that it's not finished yet, but I hope to have the second/final chapter up by end of the month.
> 
> P.S. I have interwoven some canon and modern elements here. Please allow me to take artistic liberties etc etc.

* * *

_The Snail_

Mother and father gave birth to a snail.

Night and day I crawl in smelly weeds

Dear prince, if you love me, unfasten my door

Stop, don't poke your finger up my tail!

  * Traditional Vietnamese Poem by Hồ Xuân Hương, translated by [Marilyn Chan](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/50917/snail)



  
  


## \------

Past the gleaming emerald of the forest awning, under the swoop of the low-hanging vines, and onward from the sweet-smelling camphor and mulberry trees, there was a cave. The silhouettes of three women cast long shadows in the morning light as they stood and inspected its entrance, pierced into the side of the earth like a mouth mid-yawn. 

There was nothing around but the soft cuckoos and whispers of a half-awake forest. In the midst of this dawn idyll, the shortest of the women tilted her head torch up to the sky and illuminated stalactites, which looked as if geology had frozen an ice cream in time as it melted. 

The quiet was punctured by a fruit bat that flapped and drew an arc in the air, before it disappeared back into a nest of stone columns to click at its compatriots. The whole system was alive with small creatures, and the women knew that one disturbance would set the entire colony of them into a panic. 

So they waited.

“This is it.” Rose finally said. She rolled her sleeves up, and adjusted her pack on her back. 

Jannah turned to Rey. “This is Vành ngoài?” 

“The maps aren’t wrong.” Rey said.

“Neither are you.” Jannah replied. 

Jannah wiped the sweat off her brow with one hand, and held a radar steady in the other, ready to lead the way. Next to her, Rey stood with a booted foot perched on a rock. She held a half-eaten apple and chewed into it as she leaned on one elbow to peer up at the cave roof.

It had taken them one full day of jeepney rides over bumpy terrain, then two more days of trekking over mountain, streams, and deep jungle to make it to this point. At the village they used as the setoff point for the trek, many of the locals had given Rose strange looks when she had told them, in rusty Vietnamese, that she sought the entrance to the Vành ngoài cave system. 

Most of them were too polite to let their disbelief show, but there had been a variety of reactions to this request. 

“Only crazy foreigners would want to go to Vành ngoài,” one tour guide said. 

“It’s a strange place, full of vengeful spirits and shapeshifters,” muttered a young woman who sold them vegetables.

“Why do you want to go there? Nothing there but rocks and grass,” chortled a middle-aged man who arranged their transport.

One old woman had even folded up her makeshift stall of pans and metalware at the very mention of “Vành ngoài”, which left the trio with fewer tools than they would have liked. 

Nonetheless, the women weren’t deterred. This was the same group that had scaled the Yavin Waterfall in South Africa, mapped the topography of Exegol with little more than a skeleton crew and their icepicks, and made their name in the field with their ingenuity and unconventional methods. Superstition had never stopped them from doing their jobs – as Jannah always said, “the dead have never hurt me, it’s the living who are worse”. 

The group hadn’t had much cause for concern so far. Aside from an ambitious swarm of mosquitos, the only other company they had kept in the last 70-odd hours were themselves, and the forest creatures that rustled in the undergrowth. 

“If this is really a cradle of civilisation like they say it is, I’ve gotta admit, it’s a little underwhelming.” Rose said. She double-checked their coordinates on a laminated map. 

Rey grinned. “Don’t let Holdo hear you say that.” 

The women chuckled, in common knowledge that Holdo, their team lead at the Gatalentan Geographic Society, was unlikely to be appalled at their lack of reverence. It was the same nonchalance that led to their success on previous expeditions, and earned them a regular slot on the leader boards back at the GGS headquarters in London. 

When Rey finished her apple, she weighed the core in her hand. Without a word, she then lobbed it upwards and into the mouth of the cave, and hundreds of bats flew up and over the trio in a whirling dervish. The three women watched, but did not duck. 

“Champagne toasts can wait. Let’s head,” said Rey. 

The setup was quick. They pulled on their stiff blue nylon jumpsuits and orange caving harnesses, checked and rechecked their packs, and each made sure they had the requisite materials for their tasks. Rey carried the rope as the wayfinder, Rose laid out and repacked her scientific equipment as the resident biologist, and Jannah reached for the compass attached to the side of her pack as the geologist of the team. 

Then, they were on their way.

The first section required them to traverse down a steep cliff face. After a quick analysis, they determined that the 200-foot vertical drop would require taking turns to belay each other down section-by-section. 

As the wayfinder, Rey always went first. Her breath puffed in the cool morning air as she knelt to stare down into the abyss, where she saw nothing but obsidian gloom. This didn’t, however, unnerve her. For Rey, the first drop into a cave was like tuning in to the beginnings of a radio signal, transmitted at a frequency that she alone could hear. She’d leapt off cliff sides in Thailand, skydived in New Zealand, and kite surfed in a Dubai desert, but there was nothing like the rush of blood through the veins of a good climb. 

She swung herself down the ledge and began to inch her way forward as Rose waited. Her fingers reached to find solid purchase on karst and stone, and where her eyesight failed, instinct took over as she reached for seams in the rock to find crucial hinge points, so that she could shift her balance and move downwards. 

This was the skill that had caused seasoned instructors to stop in their tracks when she first started climbing as a child in her hometown of Derbyshire. It was the same agility which made her one of the youngest speed climbing record-holders in UK history, and why Dr. Holdo had invited her to join the GGS team before she’d even started her archaeology scholarship at Cambridge. 

Where Rey liked to move fast and trust her gut, Rose and Jannah took a more conservative approach. Rose had worked her share of odd jobs washing skyscraper windows and logging hours at climbing centres before she had broken into the field. She favoured preparedness, and sketched Rey’s route with her pencil and notebook before she selected a screw-lock carabiner from her belt, and followed Rey down. Jannah, on the other hand, had grown up the youngest daughter in a large military family. Her knack for observation and patience made her an ideal group sentinel. She kept watch, and was the last to descend on the rope. 

“Belay.” Rey said, face inches from a shard of limestone. 

“Got you.” Rose replied, from her perch above. “Hey, check out that stalagmite formation. If you squint, it looks like a T-Rex.”

“You and your imagination, Rose. Told you binge-watching Jurassic Park on the iPad was a bad idea.” Jannah said.

Rose shrugged. “There isn’t much to do when the generator stops after sunset.” 

“Ah, if _only_ there were two other teammates you could talk to,” Jannah replied. 

Rey looked up at Rose, whose face was to the wall. She couldn’t make out the words, but it sounded suspiciously like, “the things I put up with...Michael B. Jordan’s pixelated abs" and “there are only so many times I can ‘fuck, marry or kill’ with you guys”. 

“I wouldn’t trade your company for the world, Rose. But Robert Falcon Scott would understand when I say I’d consider it for a hot shower,” Rey said as her palm closed on a ledge and she pivoted to swing downwards. 

Jannah’s words cut through the gloom: “Watch the protrusion to your right, LaRey Croft. We know you love sprinting like a squirrel after a chestnut, but don’t break your leg, love.”

“I’ve got it. I leave the superman manoeuvres to Poe.”

“Oh, it’s not your leg we’re worried about,” said Rose. 

Her laughter carried down to Rey, who was thirty feet ahead and rolled her eyes.

##  **##**

After they had made it down in one piece, the trio continued into the cave system. The first few miles proved more challenging than they had anticipated – Rey almost slashed her palm open when she slipped in the Mouth of Yarth, Rose had a near-miss with her head torch on a stalactite at Allyuen Pass, and the women improvised a makeshift crossing with a rope and pulley in Galaan’s Finger where Jannah had almost been dragged away by a nasty undertow. 

Four hours into their expedition, the trio were tired, thirsty, and aching.

But when they reached the open cavern of Kupoh’s Nest, what they found made them remember why the journey had been worthwhile.

The shards of mid-afternoon sun pierced through the open roof of the cavern, illuminating grey rock in spots of white and gold. By Rey’s estimation, the space was large enough to fit the Notre Dame. In the centre of the cavern was a circular pool of azure water, surrounded by moss-covered boulders that rose out of the floor in elephantine shapes, capped by a riotous field of greenery towards the north of the area that erupted out of the rock as if with little regard for ecological propriety. 

The only sonic accompaniment for a full minute was the soft flutter of swallow wings, and the slow susurrus of water droplets onto cool stone. 

_Boots down, eyes skyward,_ Holdo had said to the women, once. It was this sense of wonder that compelled Rey to push past the soreness, exhaustion, and isolation of these expeditions. Discovery was, after all, a reminder of one’s place in the cosmos, and it was what she contemplated as she crouched in the dark tunnel and waited for Rose and Jannah to arrive.

Half a minute passed before Rose emerged from the cave mouth behind Rey, and Jannah followed soon after. At the sight of the cavern, Rose squealed and dropped her pack, sprinting forward to examine a small fern in front of the pool. 

“A dolite.” Jannah whispered. 

“Yup. You reckon it was erosion?” asked Rey.

Jannah nodded.

“Would’ve taken millions of years. It’s a piece of living history. This is...exceptional.”

“It looks like a giant terrarium,” Rose said as she scribbled in her notepad. “Though definitely not the type you could buy.” 

“Anakin Skywalker would’ve had a field day.” Rey said, in reference to the famed explorer who had first discovered the elaborate Ktath'atn Cave System in Guatemala two hundred years ago. His name was the one inscribed on a plaque at the GGS library – the same plaque Rey had walked under many times on her way to check out books from the Speleology section.

It was also a well-known fact that the Skywalker family line had disappeared two generations after the expedition, and there had been no trace of them in the history books since. It was a common saying in the GGS halls – even a rite of passage – for every explorer to encounter a _Heart of Darkness_ moment on their journey, and it was said that Anakin had spent too long in the caves before he drove himself mad. 

Poe had regaled her with this story over drinks at a pub once, and she had laughed in his face. The supernatural implications of this might have caused a lesser woman than Rey to cower, but she had never grown up with much of a family tree to mourn in the first place. 

There were more important matters at hand, so she did what she always did best – put the Skywalkers to the back of her mind to re-focus on her work. 

First things first, she needed to do the first sweep of the cavern. The group agreed to split up: Rey would focus on the mossy rocks, Rose trudged towards the northern green area, and Jannah knelt down to study the pool. 

Time slipped past as Rey worked, and she found a familiar rhythm in the whirr of her battery-powered equipment, the scratch of pencil on paper, and the burn of muscle as she continued to climb the stone ledges. This cavern was smaller than some of the sprawling sites she had visited elsewhere, but the density of finds was what piqued her interest: the ledges seemed to be divided into levels, with one dias that looked as if it might be used as an altar. To the back of that was an inlet in the cave wall small enough to fit one person inside, and seemingly led nowhere, but a closer look revealed six curved symbols on the interior wall scrawled in vertical lines. She jotted “hieroglyph?” in her notepad, and another note to review this with Jannah later. 

When she paused to drink out of her bottle, Rey pulled her helmet off and shone the headtorch around the cave. She felt her heart rate climb when she thought she saw movement in the shadows. 

There had been a pull between her navel and her gut since she started her ascent on the boulders – the unnerving feeling of eyes watching her. But this was illogical, because she stood thirty feet up in the air on solid rock, and there was nothing around except the occasional bob of hair in the distance to indicate Jannah or Rose on the move. 

Rey’s experience also taught her that tricks of the eye were not unusual. Too much time inside a cave could disorientate even the most experienced explorer, so she drew on a familiar exercise to calm her nerves. 

“Bakewell, Edale, Buxton, Blackshaw Moor. Alstonefield, Eyam, Hathersage.” Rey chanted under her breath. She closed her eyes and dug her nails into the palm of her hand in time with each name, repeating the mantra until she could feel her pulse return to a regular beat. 

When she opened her eyes, the shadows remained, but there was nothing unusual to see.

“What are your secrets?” asked Rey, palm outstretched to skim against the rock. She asked it as if the walls could whisper back, but felt only the cold surface of limestone in return.

##  **##**

  
  
  


“It’s really strange. I’ve seen this variant of Gnarltree before. Usually it’s evergreen, but the shoots show that it’s deciduous…” said Rose as the women convened after an hour to break for lunch.

“Is that unusual?” Rey asked as she tore into a packet of beef jerky. 

“There’s a plasticity to this plant that wouldn’t have occurred on the outside.” Rose said. “There’s sun and water here. Its own ecosystem. So it’s almost as if it’s...adapted.”

“Or mutated.” said Rey.

There was a moment of silence as Rose and Rey considered this. Meanwhile, Jannah dropped her bag of trail mix on the ground and picked up her pH set to peer at a small syringe with yellowed water. 

“I found something too. The Calcite and Novium measurements are off the charts.”

Rey sat up straighter. “Calcite’s not a surprise, but what’s the Novium about?”

“Mineral banks, Rey. Lots of it. I haven’t seen readings like this since NaJedha.” Jannah said. 

Rose and Rey looked at each other in understanding of what it implied – where there were Novium mineral deposits, there would be Kyber. They had been part of the GGS crew who had uncovered the NaJedha Library ruins in Bahrain five years ago, where this had happened before. The needle on Jannah’s quartz crystal gauge had frozen on the highest reading, a record-breaking find. Kyber was a highly sought after commodity for use in nuclear fission, and once word got out, the corporate raiders had swooped in to drill. 

The GGS had never fully recovered from the archaeological loss. 

The three of them had been sent to Vietnam on a research mission, but had instead discovered that Vành ngoài was a potential goldmine for anyone who wanted to claim it. The new revelation sat between them like a case of unopened dynamite. 

“Let’s finish up before the light goes.” Rey said. Wordlessly, the three of them moved to their sections to continue until sunset.

Rey was still preoccupied with Jannah’s statement as she fished her tripod out of her pack. She wanted to capture a panorama of the scalloped rock formation between the moss boulders and the pool, and worked on autopilot as she switched a fixed focal lens out of her camera for a wide-angle one. 

She peered into the viewfinder to take the shot. But there was a sudden flash of movement in front of her lens – a dark blob that blocked out all visibility. Her fingertips brushed something cool and wet, and she almost knocked over the camera in surprise.

_What on earth?_

When she stepped back from the tripod, she didn’t see anything or anyone around. She frowned as she looked in the three metre radius around the tripod, and followed the sightline of where the camera was pointed. But things hadn’t changed from a few seconds ago.

Except for one thing.

_Ribbit, ribbit._

What was that?

She squinted. In the shadow cast by a nearby rock, she could make out the steady puff of an amphibian chest, about half a foot away. As she stepped closer, she saw two black eyes and two pairs of webbed feet.

It was a very large, and possibly very angry, bullfrog.

“Out of the way.” Rey waved her arm to shoo it.

It didn’t budge. 

“Oi, move.”

The frog still did nothing except puff its chest in continuous breaths as if in a bizzare cross-species standoff. 

“Suit yourself.” Rey reached out to flick the frog off the rock, and the frog _bleated_ , but did not budge. 

In the same instant, Rose emerged from behind a bush at the end of the cave and picked off several twigs out of her hair.

“Hey, have you got the remote-controlled flashes? I spotted some really cool crystalline formations up there and I want a composite shot. We’re gonna bloooow Holdo’s mind.” Rose said, as she pulled her own camera out of her holster. 

“Wait. Holy shit, is that a bullfrog?”

“Pay it no mind Rose, we’ve got to keep working.”

“Oh, but it’s adorable!” Rose exclaimed. She stooped to place her equipment on a nearby rock. “You look like a banded variety. What are you doing here, little buddy? Isn’t it a bit far from your lily pond?” 

“I mean, there is a freshwater source right here, so maybe that’s where it’s from.”

“But _look at you_. You must be a boy, you’re way too large to be a female specimen. Let me get a photo of you....”

“Are we really doing this now? The light’s going –”

“It’s for science. Plus, he’s adorable. Y’know, in Chinese mythology, these are considered good luck.” 

“...your grandparents are from Hanoi.”

“Hey. I’m East Asian, our myths share a common root. Let me have this.”

“Funny. If only we had coconut milk and some bird’s eye chilis.” Rey mused. “I make a mean frog soup.”

Rey lurched towards the frog as if to grab it, and the frog emitted a high-pitched croak of alarm as it sprang out of the way. Rose, meanwhile, looked scandalised.

“First of all, I can’t believe you’d say that to a vegetarian, even though I admit frog soup is delicious and I miss it. Second of all, you could totally just let it hitch a ride on your backpack and we could take him with us. We have enough food for four days down here and then some.”

“What’s going on?” asked Jannah as she walked towards the two women.

“Rose found a frog.”

“Technically, you did Rey. But Jans. LOOK AT HOW CUTE IT IS. Doesn’t his little frog face look so sad?”

They studied the frog, still sat on a rock, and it did look bereft. 

“I have never seen a Gates scholar go so ham for animals, every single time. Is this going to be like last summer when you forced us to take in five hamsters?”

“That was a salvage mission for a colony breeding experiment gone wrong, but let's not digress,” Rose said. “There are scientific grounds for this, too. I already looked all around the forest area and didn’t see any trace of a frog colony. I don’t think he belongs down here. Lemme bring him back up with us. Or at the very least take him up and release him where there’s a pond with some Anuran brethren.” Rose added.

Rey narrowed her eyes at Rose as Jannah sighed.

“Cool, but I’m not looking after it. I’m here for the rocks.”

“Yep. You’re the one who’s got to figure out the feeding schedule, or whatever frog nutrition’s required.” Rey added.

Rose made some jazz hands at the frog as she performed a celebratory jig on the spot. The frog, meanwhile, seemed nonplussed. 

_Frogs don’t have expressions._ Rey thought. So why did it seem like the frog was studying her, and not the other way around? She chalked it up to the lack of sleep, euphoria from the day’s discoveries, or possible dehydration.

Stranger things had happened, and Rey decided not to focus too much on it. She tried to ignore Rose – who had moved on from jazz hands to the running man – and looked into the viewfinder of her camera once more. It wasn’t long before Rey fell into the lull of the shutter’s rhythmic clicks, and the low croak of the bullfrog that remained beside her.

**Author's Note:**

> So technically Ben is already in the story - dun dun dun - but we have yet to properly *meet* him. I'm sure you'll have good guesses who (or what) he is by now. 
> 
> Apologies if it feels like it's taking a while to get to his story, but I promise the next chapter will make this a lot clearer! (The worldbuilding was just so fun.)
> 
> Thanks again to my beta YL for her quick look at this. 
> 
> If you enjoyed the chapter or have thoughts, please feel free to leave kudos and/or comments!
> 
> ##
> 
> Some quick references (sorry, won't link 'cus HTML and me are a terrible match):
> 
> Vành ngoài is a rough translation of 'outer rim'. Thanks Google.
> 
> Yavin, Exegol, Gatalenta, Yarma, Allyuen, Kupoh, Ktath'atn, Gnarltree, Nova (Element, renamed Novium here), Kyber (Crystal), NaJedha are all loose respins from SWverse
> 
> Anura is the nerdy term for frogs
> 
> Michael B. Jordan is bae, and his abs are outstanding
> 
> Antarctica was explorer Robert Falcon Scott's bae
> 
> GGS is based on the Royal Geographical Society
> 
> A dolite is a type of cave that's collapsed and opened to the outside 
> 
> Heart of Darkness is by Joseph Conrad
> 
> ##
> 
> Say hi on [twitter](https://twitter.com/bobaheadshark)


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